Radeon 9800SE cooling?

As posted elsewhere, I have a powercolor 256-bit Radeon 9800SE softmodded to a pro, and overclocked a bit.

I am not looking for crazy overclocking, if I cook a card, I would have to use a cheap-o $50 for at least a couple months, so I'm just looking to preserve what I got now.

The case has very good cooling, with 8 fans in the case and a great CPU fan, but the video card just has stock cooling. Under full load, the memory chips on the card feel pretty hot. It doesnt get so hot that you cant keep a finger on it, but it does get uncomfortably warm.

This card is not artifacting at all, no white specks on the pixel shader tests, works great, and I just want to keep it that way for at least a year if possible. Do I have anything to worry about, or should I invest in cooling? Would some nice ramsinks be good enough, or something more drastic?

How much do u want to spend? get a Silencer from Artic Cooling. Also get or make some ram sinks. Ram sinks normaly don't help your OC by more then 2-10 mhz but every little bit helps!?. Also a stock AMD hs work wonders on ALL Radeon cards that you want to be overclocked. On Newegg.com the silncer costs 20-25 bucks and it will cost you around that much for 8 ram sinks. So for around 40 bucks u can have GREAT cooling on it. Or you could do it 4 free if u have an old AMD hs and an old HS that u can cut up to make the ram sinks u r golden!

http://www.svc.com/vgaandbga.html here this should work well

I do understand that I can get better speeds with better cooling, and based on that I may improve cooling someday.

What I'm mainly wanting to know, is given that I have the above card o/c to 394/354, stable with no artifacts, would it be advisable to get better cooling to preserve the health of the card? Or do I pretty much have nothing to worry about the card burning up, and would only need better cooling or ramsinks to o/c even higher? The memory feels kinda hot, but I dunno if thats normal or not.

Well to be honest with you, good cooling will always help preserve the life of any electrical component. If you are in the least bit worried about the temps, then by all means do something about it. But if the card is functioning properly and you arent having lockups or shutdowns then it is probably being cooled well enough. Its your call man, if you think that the card is running too hot then stick some sinks on there and a better heatsink on the GPU and call her good. Also, good job on getting the card to mod in the first place.

Makes sence. I think I'll get some Ramsinks for now, and maybe more expensive cooling later. Even if the Ramsinks do absolutely nothing to cool the card, it would make me feel better, and it would look cool as hell.

in that case it is your own call. for 20 buxs in that link u get the silencer and the ram sinks..it will cost u over that just 4 the sinks. So get that and u kill 2 birds with one stone!